The U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) will review Rice University in Houston for a complaint of discrimination involving shared ancestry, it announced on Tuesday.
In March, according to the student newspaper The Rice Thresher, a student filed a discrimination complaint with the Texas school’s Office of Access, Equity and Equal Opportunity, leading to the postponement of a vote by the Student Association to divest from Israel.
Simon Yellen, a junior at Rice’s Duncan College, reportedly said at a meeting of the student Senate that “nearly every other university that has passed a resolution like this is currently under investigation by the Department of Education for violating Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.”
U.S. News & World Report has ranked Rice as one of the nation’s top 20 private universities. The Anti-Defamation League gave the school a C on a recent report card evaluating the problem of antisemitism at colleges across the country.
David Leebron, the former university present and second Jewish one, told the Houston-based Jewish Herald-Voice in May that he was “deeply concerned about antisemitism on our campus and deeply concerned about the ignorance that so many of the protesters are manifesting—about both Jewish history and the history of Israel.”
Leebron said “this notion that 7 million Jews should be driven out of Israel, I do find antisemitic. The history is deeply complicated and stretches over 3,000 years.”
JNS contacted Rice and requested a copy of the letter the school received from the OCR but did not receive a response at press time. It typically does not provide reasons for the opening of investigations into potential violations of Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.
